Rachel Cusk, Will Self 19 Nov; 2015 Creative Responses to Modernism

The King’s College London Centre for Modern Literature and Culture is pleased to announce that our 2015 Competition for Creative Responses to Modernism is now open. This year the competition is open to postgraduate students from throughout the UK. You are invited to submit texts (up to 2000 words), images, films (up to 15 minutes), digital artefacts, musical compositions (up to 12 minutes for up to two instruments or for electronics*).

Please do come along to our launch event for the 2015 competition:

Inventing the Modern Novel

Wed 19 November, 6.30-7.45pm, Edmund J Safra Lecture Theatre

Rachel Cusk and Will Self in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi

Acclaimed novelists Rachel Cusk and Will Selfwill explore the influence of modernist literature on their own work and interrogate what it might mean to be influenced by modernism. Is modernism more a period of early-twentieth century art or a set of styles? If the modernist novel still exists today, is it necessarily formally avant-garde? Does it continue Virginia Woolf’s task of tracing ‘the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall’? Does it employ what TS Eliot termed ‘the mythical method’, as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’?

This discussion is free and will be followed by a drinks reception. It is open to the wider public but 150 seats have been set aside for students eligible to enter our Creative Responses to Modernism competition.

In the early decades of the twentieth century writers, visual artists, filmmakers and musicians across the world competed to follow Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘make it new’. Whether artists were willing or resisting change – hurling themselves into the (often technological) future or hankering elegiacally after lost forms and ways of life – the first fifty years of the twentieth century saw an explosion of artistic production in all the arts. Shaken up by two world wars, stirred by the invention of cinema, artists questioned what art was and could be and asserted its value in a fragmented yet increasingly interconnected world.

Postgraduate students are invited to submit their own creative responses to this moment of artistic explosion in whatever art form seems most appropriate. This might be a homage, pastiche or parody or could be a much freer (and less historical) engagement with modernism. You might see yourself as continuing, challenging or simply evoking the modernist project. The judges are looking for originality and hope to be made both to think and feel. Entries should be accompanied by a paragraph (up to 150 words) explaining the work of art and its relation to modernism.

The prize is open to postgraduate students from across Britain and will be judged by our Advisory Board (Lisa Appignanesi, Michael Berkeley, AS Byatt, Alison Duthie, Juliet Gardiner, Jeremy Harding, Michael Holroyd, Stephen Romer, Fiona Shaw).

The deadline for the prize is Monday 30 March 2015. Entries should be submitted to modern@kcl.ac.uk(or posted to Dr Lara Feigel, English department, King’s College London, Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London WC2B 6NR).

The three shortlisted entries will be published in the journal Textual Practice and on our website. If a musical composition is shortlisted it will receive a concert performance before the prize-giving ceremony which will also be recorded and published on our website. The winner will receive a year’s membership to the Tate (or the equivalent museum in the recipient’s home city) and all the shortlisted contestants will meet the Advisory Board at a dinner following the prize-giving ceremony in June 2015.

The Centre for Modern Literature and Culture was founded in September 2013 and is currently engaged in a project called ‘Inventing the Modern’. We aim to provide a hub for investigating modernist culture in London, initiating conversation and collaboration between researchers and creative artists. For us modernism can be seen as reaching back into the nineteenth century and forward into the twenty-first, embracing all art forms and nationalities and often mingling popular culture and high art. Our mission is to bring together academics, writers and artists to explore, interrogate, dismantle and reinvent the notion of the ‘modern’. For more details about the Centre see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/cmlc/aboutus.aspx . To join our mailing list please email modern@kcl.ac.uk with the heading ‘join mailing list’.

* Music scores, which may be accompanied by a recording (in WAV or mp3 format), should be either posted as hardcopies or send electronically in PDF.Musical compositions for electronic medium should be submitted in WAV format only.Any works that include extensive improvisatory or aleatoric elements should beaccompaniedby a recording of a performance.